The Artistic Synthesis That Gave Bloom to Our Exotica Cover

In particular, Egoyan pointed us to The Dream—arguably Rousseau’s masterpiece—as a potentially rich starting point for a new cover design. The 1910 painting features a nude female figure and lurking jungle fauna—figures that could be substituted with the characters played by Kirshner, Greenwood, and Koteas. To bring this idea to life, we turned to Spanish artist David de las Heras, whose facility with classical techniques; mastery of lush, colorful botanicals; and surrealist bent made him particularly well-suited to the assignment. “I hadn’t seen the movie before, and when I watched it, I fell in love with it,” the artist says. But doing justice to two formidable artists was a daunting task: “I thought that anything I made wouldn’t be as good as Atom’s and Rousseau’s creations.” De las Heras brought his own sensibility to bear on the project, retrofitting The Dream to a more vertical shape and infusing the art with the bold colors that are his signature.

For his part, Egoyan is quite pleased with the final result. “What I love about the cover design for this Criterion release is that it captures the awkward dynamic of these characters as they navigate through the jungle of their shattered lives,” the director says. “Sometimes, the most exotic thing about our lives is our relationship to our twisted realities. In writing and structuring this film, I attempted to get inside the way these characters felt about their lives, and it was exciting to see how this artist was able to express this almost thirty years after we shot the film itself.”